INHERIT THE WIND (1960)

Everyone’s at their worst in the opening scenes of this fictionalized version of the famous 1920s Monkey Trial, where liberal defense lawyer Clarence Darrow squared off against populist politician/religious fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan on the right to teach Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.  And as ‘everybody’ includes issue-conscious producer/director Stanley Kramer, ‘worst’ is pretty bad indeed.  Here, on airless small-town Main Street studio lot sets, he paints the mood by endlessly repeating ‘Give Me That Old Time Religion,’ sung as a dirge by Leslie Uggams while locals join in, not a phony strand of hair out of place, as character setting lines like ‘Don’t worry, I may be rancid butter, but I’m on your side of the bread’ rain down upon us.  (What does that even mean?  Is it the Kramer Family Motto?)  What a relief to get inside the courtroom, where, in spite of simplification to dumb-down issues for Junior High School Civics class consumption*, a certain level of B’way expertise from playwrights Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee rescue us.  Spencer Tracy & Fredric March showboat to beat the band as the Darrow & Bryan substitutes.  If only someone had thought of swapping roles to give Bryan a fighting chance at our sympathy.  (George C. Scott one of many to have played both.)  The sum effect leaving us without a question in sight.  And thru some alchemy all his own, Kramer managing to find the villain of the piece in soulless cultural pundit/reporter H. L. Mencken, the man who looked at America and saw the ‘booboisie,’ dubbed this ‘the Monkey Trial,’ and said, ‘As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron.’  Villain or prophet?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The real story so much more involving, with the teacher in on the plan to test the restrictive state law, and social media of the era highjacking the Theory of Evolution into ‘Social Darwinism,’ pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo that was the Northern Racism of the day.